29yearold, what emerged from his reading of the 2004 Alexander Hamilton is now the hottest ticket on broadway, the hiphop musical hamilton. Broadway play is widely note for many things, including its exact fidelity to the historical facts. So beach books need not be light read, and the right beach book can kick up a lot of sand. As it happens whether the top five most assigned common readings for College Freshman last year was also a book about the obstacles overcome by an immigrant. It is the considerably shorter enriques journey, which offers a harrowing account of a 16yearold honduran boy, a drug user and a thief, who makes his way through mexico and across the texas border at laredo. His book contrasts on several points one is that enriques journey is written at a level appropriate for fifth graders. As gauged by the independent rating system. Well, welcome to the launch of the National Association of scholars new edition of beach booksful its our fifth. This Edition Covers the books assigned by colleges and universities to their incoming freshmen classes in summer of 2014 and 2015. We have a splendid lineup of speakers to break the champagne lot oval the bow of beach books number five. A little later well hear from executive director of the nas, ashley thorne, who first conceived of studying and reading programs as a way to illuminate what colleges really value. She wrote the first four reports, and established the subject as something that book professors and the general public takes seriously. We also will hear from the nas director of communication, david randall. Who wrote this new report. Dr. Randall, whose ph. D from rutgers is in history, joined the National Association of scholars only in october 1st, and his first assignment was to synthesize our massive collection of data on the common readings programs into coherent analysis. He did astonishingly good work in these last few months and well have time later on for questions and conversations, but our keynote speaker is mark bauerline, professor of english at emery university, former director of research and analysis at the National Endowment for the arts. Let me say how grateful i am that first thing is hosting the launch of this report. One of the true storm walls in our society again the raging seas sea immediate county tritt that threaten to drown or public culture. The quality books shape the minds of the coming generation as clearly a matterunder general si. The probation officer can explain that much better than i. [applause] thank you for coming here. Its not happy news to speak about Higher Education about their reading choices that are made by the colleges every year, and what im going to do here is just lay out the background about why Colleges Even have these programs at all, and actually to give a little bit of sympathy for the problems that theyre facing when they do assign these books and what they hope these programs, which can run all year long they collect a book, have the incoming students read it, spend a few weeks, organize a program, debate, bring some assignments into the courses that are oriented towards the become they have the author very important to have the author attend and speak. So its a long process. Much as the assignment of books for them all to read. Over the summer. And they wanted to be an extended experience. They want them to spend some time with this book. Why . A lot of other courses to take. Graduated from high school. All summer long, admitted to this institution. Why pile on this extra reading, this extra test. The last thing you want to do is read books over the summer and well see thats one of the issues. So, just briefly, there really are i choose three major problems that schools face today with their incoming students. Actually is not so much the selective institutions but all the others, but actually it affects the selected institutions as well. One is that they read one book, and this is something that doesnt exist otherwise. There is no common reading now either in American Life, in general, or in the schools curriculum. I ask students in a class if i refer to a book, i teach American Literature. Huck finn . Some of them maybe two or three out of the 20 students in the class have read it. Great gatsby. Maybe a couple. The most popular ones the days for High School Reading are oto kill a mockingbird, probably the most popular novel that is chosen in high school, more than have threat but still only 20 of the kid there was a report on this a few years ago. This is a unique actual condition in American Life of for 150 years in the schools and out of the schools, the bible was the book everybody knew. The bible was everywhere. It was in political discourse. It was in School Reading books. The american primmer, lessons around biblical verses. Everyone read the bible or head it read in church, at the dinner table. That was a book that was common could everyone. So i actually have my American Literature students all read portions of genesis and leviticus which is very important at the time of the founding. And the sermon on the mount so when i say to students, president obama in his first nature inaugural used the phrase, time to put away childish things. Does anyone know where that came from . That not the sermon on the mount but five months later. Im getting i dont want to say second corinthian. Public schools grew more secular. We did have really for a few decades there there was a fairly common core curriculum in 11th for 12th grade, sometimes earlier grades, where you did have a set of american works that most students did read. The short stories and the Scarlet Letter letter, walt whitman and emerson, and huck finn, gatsby, hemingway. Fairly solid for the 50s, 60s and 70s and multiculture uranium along and killed that tradition and the promise of mussty culturallism is we would have those works being read but a much richer set as well. More literature by women and minorities. Authors, and this would actually build Greater Knowledge so we would have an africanamerican literary tradition that people would know to go along with other traditions. That isnt what happened. What happened was that instead of having a bigger tradition that everyone would read portions of, it became all over the place. Teachers are largely allowed to select or School Districts select their own works. Common core does not have a required reading list. Theres a recommend reading list and it is largely ignored in the implementation of common core. We dont want to tell people what to read. That sounds like prescriptions and we dont want to get to that because you start excluding things, telling people what to do and its going to be too narrow and so on. So this leaves us with a students who havent read a common book, and the problem is if people they dont have some cultural thing in common, you cant build a culture out of them. The schools in the report talk about community. Well, theyre right to say, one of the ways in which you have a community is people have read the same thing. They have some of the same cultural background. So this is one thing, one problem. The lack of any common reading that the program tries to address. Two, students dont like to read. They dont read very much on their own. Not just they dont have a common reading assignment in school or on their own. We might want to talk about harry potter. Thats the one thing you can mention in class that most of the kid know, but you never know. They may have just seen the movies. Were far beyond the publication in their lives at this point, but they dont read very much on their own. Ill give you some numbers on this. This is from the 2014 American Freshman survey, very large survey project at ucla. Goes week in mid60s. Here the race for the students who come into college, firstyear students and these are Fouryear College students, not twoyear college or anything. Vocational. These are fouryear baccalaureate institutions. The rate of reading for pleasure, how often in a week do you read for pleasure . How many hours do you log . That was the question. This is the largest cohort in 31 answered, none. Nearly a third of them never read for pleasure. Moreless than one hour, zero minutes to one hour, 24 . One to two hours a week, 22 . Got that. About threequarters of the students reading is a negligeable activity at best. They just dont read many books on their own. At all. Assigning the common reading is youre entering a world in which you have to read books. College is going to ramp up the reading requirement on your own. Youre not going to see a teacher every day who is going to go through a few pages with you at a time. Youll have to be a selfstarter, on your own. If you you drop out the teacher doesnt care. Sometimes dont even know in larger classes theres no babysitting here, no parachute for you. If you just disappear, this is letting you know, you have to accustom yourself to going through a 300 page book, 200 page book, and spending time with it. You have to live with this book over time. Many of those teachers will say its getting harder and harder to assign a book more than 200 pages. Students doesnt go with the rhythms of their life. You cant read a few pains and then do this and then go back. It doesnt work at the college level. So the one book program tries to get them to be more bookish. Thats the intent. Now, some people will say, well, they dont read because they dont have time to read, because they are piling up so many hours of homework. This i problem number three. This where is the American Freshman survey comes in on homework time. This is what students report. Not how many hours of homework they are assigned; how much they actually do. And studying homework hours per week. These are Fouryear College students. Less than two hours a week, 29 . Three to five hours a week, 27 . Six to ten, 21 . Remember, six to ten. Thats not much more than an hour a day. One hour a day, all weekend long. Two hours. Of study time. Now, you get below that, less than an hour a day for nearly 60 of the Fouryear College. Students. So it is not homework that is taking away reading minutes from them. Its not making them less bookish, but weve got to get them there. Colleges are partly graded on retention. Dropouts look very bad for institutions. The obama the accreditation issues can come into play. So theres a lot of pressure to keep students there on the campus. So, let me add one more factor to this. That relates somewhat to the reading factor. You dont read on your own you dont do that much homework. You dont know very much. The Knowledge Level that students come into college with are abysmal. Theyre abysmal. Its not just their reading skills, which are quite low. Last years s. A. T. Reading scores, the lowest in 40 years. Since 1972. A. C. T. , the college readiness, 46 of students taking the a. C. T. The sarge majority of them are going to college only 40 are collegeready. That means they can bet a bminus in a freshman english class. Most of them are going to get c or below. The s. A. T. Writing test, in 2005, last year the lowest scores ever. In fact the scores have gone down every single year except two years when they were flat. So, this is what is happening with the s. A. T. Scores. If you look at the National Assessment of educational progress, this is the nations report card, given to 12th 12th graders by the federal government in content areas in geography, 20 of 12 graders in 2010 were proficient. In u. S. History, only 12 were proficient. In civics, only 24 . So we got very low Knowledge Levels theyre coming in with. So if im not a class and refer to french revolution, if im doing something about thomas jefferson, i have to explain what that is. You cant just assume that the students have historical Civic Knowledge about things. This is another issue that the one book reading can solve. You select a book that has a lot of accompanying knowledge thats going to go into it as well. You select charles dickens, a tale of two cities. Getting something about at the french revolution which will carry over. So you want to select a book that is knowledge rich, going to bring cultural literacy to them that will again fill out that the big gap in their heads. So thats what the onebook program is ideally going to do. Its going to address those. You want to tell us if that happens . Thank you all again for coming out on a night theyre predicting snow, and its also mardi gras. Can you hear me . Okay. Great. And thank you to first things for hosting us. We did get started on this. I wanted to give a little background and david is going to tell about the findings. We got started in 2010 when an nas faculty member told me about a book that his college was assigning as something called common reading, and i didnt know what this was, and wanted to find out if if a lot of other colleges were doing this, and turned out there were 300 colleges and universities around the country that were advertising that they had this one book for college freshmen, and so we put together this list for the first time. Peter and i came up with subject categories to talk about what the books focused on, the themes they focused on, and looked at the trends among what was most popular in the books. We gave our own analysis of what this means for Higher Education more generally, and also started a list of recommended titles that colleges could pick from as better books for next year, and at the time common reading programs were on the rise, and so everyone involved in these kinds of programs was looking for onestop place to go to learn what books were being assigned and what the trends were. So, we unknowingly created something that was very useful for people, and its now become their goto source. Its been cited by the nla and their national conference. Faculty members come to us now and theyre serving on committees for selecting the book. We included every common reading we could find from stanford to owednesdayboro community knowledge, and so because of that, this the only comprehensive list like this. Ive spoken with a lot of the people who coordinate common reading programs and these are faculty members and administrators who genuinely want students to love reading and to talk with one another about the book. Theyre concerned with community. Theres a lack of intellectual community but they get stuck in using templates, patterns that are set up and accepted as the way the programs are run and this is what we should do. They use large committees to select the book by popular vote instead of having a few people who are well read choose good books for all the students. They dont assess whether students have actually read the book. They dont have a test or a grade to hold them accountable, and they always try to bring the author to come to speak on campus, which is fine but it limits them to only choosing contemporary books. And they generally dont think outside the box of what other colleges are doing. One way that nas has been encouraging common reading coordinators to think outside the box is to assign older and classic books. These are the underrepresented items in these lists of what is being assigned, and when i say classics, im thinking of that in a generous way, not just greek and roman classics but the thing that mark was talking about a authors like dickens and twain and worked that have stood the test of time, that are still considered of enduring value and importance. Well, so, coordinators that we have talked to have given a lot of pushback as to why they say they cannot or dont want to assign older classic books, and so i have collected these objections and answered all of them in the last section of the report, the very last pages. I have 25 so far. Just thought of another couple of them while i was sitting here. My hope is to say, yes, it is possible to choose more difficult, more challenging and better books and still accomplish the things you want to do with these programs, and to make the most of this opportunity. One of the objections that i have heard is that because this is not for a grade, then if students dont like the book, they just wont read it. So the only hope you have of getting students to read it is to pick a book they like. So our job is find out what students want to read and then well assign that to them. So, in principle thats a good idea to want to choose books that students will enjoy but in the long run that doesnt help them because the whole reason that people go to college instead of staying home and reading the books you already know that you like, is to have your mind informed by people who know more than you do. Another pushback ive heard is that the classics are elitist, that they are all privileged. Theyre for the privileged. And to that i say, it is a privilege to get to read these books, and we should give that privilege to as many people as we can. A lot of people especially the ones who are taking the trouble to go to college, we hear talk a lot today about giving more access to Higher Education, and if we really want to give people access to literally opening up their world, if not to something that is truly higher. In this edition we have guest essays by two individuals who agree with nas on these things, but for different reasons, coming from different angles. One is bruce gan, a creator of the create books curriculum that has been used across the country in community colleges. So he has shown that anyone can benefit from and enjoy reading the great books. The other is linda hall, who is a professor of english at skidmore college. She roughers to herself in the essay as a liberal feminist. She sees value in letting books cool for a while and letting them prove themselves over time before suddenly assigning them as common reading. She also thinks that colleges are trying to accomplish too much with just one book and that common reading programs should be reevaluated. So im really grateful to have got ton have these conversations and others through these last few years with this project, and ive now passed the baton to my knowledge, david randall, who has taken it up with great talent and skill and its been gratifying to see him notice things i hadnt yet n